Our story

Nora Castellanos started selling sourdough from a folding table at the Hyde Park market in 2017, baking forty loaves a week in a rented church kitchen. The shop on South Howard Avenue opened in the spring of 2019 with one deck oven and three employees.

Today there are two ovens, eleven of us, a small stone mill in the back, and a line out the door most Saturdays. We still bake the same country loaf Nora sold off the table, with the same starter, which is now nine years old and named Gladys.

Regulars from the market years sometimes still text Nora's old cell, (813) 555-0133, to hold a loaf. She will answer, eventually, but the shop phone is the one that reaches the person standing next to the bread.

How we bake

Every bread is naturally leavened, with no commercial yeast, and fermented for at least eighteen hours. We mill about a third of our flour from Florida and Georgia grain on the stone mill, and buy the rest from a mill in North Carolina. Butter is from a Wisconsin creamery; eggs come from two farms in Plant City; the guava paste for the pastelitos is from Ybor City.

The kitchen

We bake in a licensed commercial kitchen inspected by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and our pickles are made under a scheduled process reviewed by a process authority, as the state requires for acidified foods sold by the jar.